There’s an article in today’s Irish Times by Pat Leahy which touches on something many of us so dread, we don’t like to think of it. Besides, we’ve got enough to worry about: the cost of housing, the cost of living, war in Ukraine, Covid, the environmental crisis. Leahy forefronts the nightmare crouching at the back of our minds : the return of the border.
At present, the Tory government is in a mess and intent on creating a further mess. Boris Johnson is a wounded big beast, and more than one commentator has said it’s not a question of if but when Johnson is ousted from his position as prime minister. You can fool some of the people all of the time, etc.
Increasingly desperate, Johnson is keen to create diversion of party and public attention by engaging in confrontation with the EU, and under that heading he’s doing pretty well. How long is it since you’ve read or heard a commentary on partygate? All the attention is now on the protocol. And at the heart of the protocol there’s a double devil.
The first devil is that, courtesy of the DUP, the Stormont Assembly will be sabotaged. As things stand, it’s more likely that time will run out and a second election to the Assembly will need to be called, but it’s hard to see how that’d change things. The alternative is that the DUP will start engaging in honest politics and re-enter the Executive, and that’s unlikely.
The second devil involves the “hollowing out” (copyright Prof Katie Hayward) of the protocol on goods coming from Britain to NEI; in other words Westminster will allow no checks on the movement of goods from Britain to NEI. This will mean that some of these goods will meet EU standards, others won’t. But standard or sub-standard, those goods will be free to flow south and into the EU. The notion of the EU as a single market, available to members but not to non-members, will be destroyed. A leak of sub-standard goods will begin to pass into the EU, and the source of the leak will be Britain and the south of Ireland.
Up to now, there has been a general acceptance that, no matter what, there will be no land border in Ireland. But we have tended to think of that as a border manned by Britain. If the British abandon control of products coming from GB to NEI, one of two things will happen: either the single EU market will become polluted by sub-standard trade coming from Ireland, or somebody will have to pick up the border burden that the British have ignored. In short, it will be up to the south of Ireland to mount checks – create a land border – in Ireland. The EU expects all its members to defend the Single Market, and if the British don’t care, it’ll be down to the Irish.
A land border in Ireland has been seen as unthinkable, because it could very well ignite the house of violence from which we’ve recently crawled free. But that was a border maintained by Britain and manned by British forces.
Could it be that the British don’t care if a land border is created in Ireland, as long as they aren’t called on to man it? And if the south of Ireland is forced, as a member of the EU, to build a border that will stem the flow of sub-standard British goods into the EU, what then? Will those opposed to a land border resort to violence but not this time against British forces but against Irish forces? Those who detest the disruption a border creates will be pitted against the south and the EU, while Britain shrugs its shoulders and expresses its dismay that Irish people (and the EU) can’t agree among themselves.
If things come to that pass, I see only one possible chink of light: a border poll which, if won by those favouring Irish re-unification, would automatically remove the need for a land border in Ireland and allow all of Ireland to enjoy EU membership.
There are those who say Britain would happily off-load NEI if it could. This would be one way of doing so.
Comments are closed.